Sadurn — Radiator

In which a hand bursts forth from the earth and Nightswimming claws itself from a shadow grave

the sound radiates

from my stereo — soundtrack

to my life, these days

Look, it’s been a while since we’ve talked, so I’ll cut to the chase: I really love this album.  I have listened to Radiator, on average, about twice a day for the week or so since I found it.  I’ve been sending it around like a madman, blowing up the text inboxes of several long-suffering friends.  Something between the loping, leisurely guitar and the clear-eyed, pretensionless vocals keep me coming back for more, over and over and over again.

I can’t help but admire Sadurn’s ability to drive a song to crescendo without ever really increasing in volume or tempo.  At the album’s most gripping moments (and there are many), it slams you instead with the unassailably mellow intensity of its intimacy.  It holds you in a tractor beam and it keeps you in a trance.  It is lovely.

Editor’s note:

Yup, I’m back. After taking a year-long hiatus from amateur music journalism (in which time I launched a new publication, Reasonably Speedy, to cover collegiate club running), I started to remember just how much I love writing about music. Hopefully soon I’ll be getting published on more platforms than just my own, but in the meantime I’ve decided to dive back into the music newsletter game.

This time I’m holding myself to neither schedule nor format. A lot of posts are probably going to be like this — short album reviews, brief musings, etc. The upside

¹

is that I should be able to write a lot more this way. I’m living in Richmond, I’m learning my way around the freelance world

²

, and I’m trying to figure out what it’ll take before I get to tell people I’m a “music journalist.”

Bear with me, friends. I’m gonna have way too much fun with this.

1. Depending on who you ask

2. I’m also working as a journalist in a non-partisan newsroom within a devoutly conservative radio station. The news department at this station is something of an enclave of fact floating in a deep sea of bonkers. Considering my own (extremely unConservative, for the record) political inclinations, this is bound to be a wild ride.